Friedrich Albert Lange 1828 – 1875

Friedrich Albert Lange was a German neo-Kantian philosopher and social theorist and the author of the most influential nineteenth-century critique of materialism. Trained at Bonn and Zurich, he spent his career between Duisburg, Winterthur, and Marburg, where he was finally appointed to a chair shortly before his death. His two-volume History of Materialism, published in 1866 and much expanded in 1873 to 1875, traced the materialist tradition from antiquity to the present and argued that materialism, while a useful working assumption of the natural sciences, is metaphysically untenable from a Kantian standpoint. The book shaped a generation of European thinkers, including the young Nietzsche.